Peter Tamte, president of Atomic games, is not going to give up on his controversial “Six Days in Falujah” videogame without a fight.
Having been told by Japanese company Konami that it was cancelling plans to publish the game next year, Tamte said Tuesday that he would seek other ways to finish the game.
“We were informed on Thursday night that Konami had decided to pull out of Six Days in Fallujah,” Tamte said in a statement provided to Local Tech Wire and WRAL.com.
“This caught us by surprise,” he added. “Development of the game had been progressing very well and on schedule. We would very much like the opportunity to complete the game.”
Konami’s decision, which was disclosed in a statement issued Monday, came after an outcry in the U.S.,
The game aimed to reproduce the bloody street battles between U.S. soldiers and insurgents in Fallujah, Iraq, in 2004. Thousands of people, including many Iraqi citizens, and 38 U.S. soldiers were killed in the fighting. The outrage over the game showed that even video games can hit too close to home, despite the fact that realistic war games based on history are a staple of the industry.
The news came two days ahead of the first Triangle Game Conference. at which Peter Tamte, president of Atomic, will deliver one of the keynote addresses. The conference is April 29-30 in Raleigh..
.A longtime veteran of the videogame industry, Tamte is founder and president of Destineer, a publisher of so-called casual games. He plans to discuss the continuously evolving economics of the videogame industry.
"The interactive entertainment industry continues to be one of the fastest growing job sectors and it’s just a fragment of what it will become in the next decade," said Tamte. "I feel the Triangle region – with its hotbed of game development talent – will help drive that advancement."
However, the Fallujah title created a great deal of controversy far from the company’s home base.
The freshness of the combat, the emotions around the lynching of U.S. contractors in Fallujah, and the fact that there are still people dying in Iraq clearly contributed to the controversy. Families of soldiers, military retirees and citizens groups in the U.S. and Europe criticized the game as being in poor taste and insensitive.
Konami officials said in a statement, “After seeing the reaction to the video game in the United States and hearing opinions sent through phone calls and e-mail, we decided several days ago not to sell it. We had intended to convey the reality of the battles to players so that they could feel what it was like to be there.”
The game was being developed by Atomic Games, which showed off scenes from the game at a Konami event this month. The game was scheduled to debut in 2010. Atomic had the help of soldiers who fought in Fallujah, but critics apparently ignored that sensitivity.
I would argue that the loss of this game isn’t a tragedy. Games often blur the line between reality and fantasy, but there are plenty of other ultra-realistic games out there that offer a similar realistic experience and yet clearly stay on the side of fiction. Those games include titles such as the Battlefield series, Full Spectrum Warrior, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare. The companies made a mistake here in failing to anticipate the depth of emotion surrounding fresh events where real people died in horribly public ways.
Even though Atomic Games has a reputation of doing games that are respectful of the sacrifice of soldiers, this game was particularly controversial, since soldiers in the game had to decide whether to shoot civilians.
